According to police records, there have been 19 incidents of indiscriminate violence in China this year in which the perpetrator was not known to the victims. Sixty-three people have been killed and 166 injured in these attacks. This is a sharp increase on previous years - 16 killed and 40 injured in 2023, for instance. While the incidents are still sporadic and rare, they are high-profile. And the videos that often circulate soon after on social media have prompted concern and fear among people. “These are symptoms of a society with a lot of pent-up grievances,” Lynette Ong, distinguished professor of Chinese politics at Canada’s University of Toronto, told AFP. “Some people resort to giving up. Others, if they’re angry, want to take revenge.” A slowing economy, high youth unemployment and a property crisis that has hurt savings have led to increasing uncertainty about the future among Chinese people.
A global look at Short form video as the latest trend in mass misinformation campaigns, including which interest groups, or states conduct them and who they contract (from large scale to possibly unwitting small creators) to produce and post it. How it developed from prior trends, and where it might go next. Perhaps not particularly controversial (in the true sense of the word), but geopolitically worth looking at and discussing more in imo. Of course a privacy and security focus on this is very much integral to the issue by default. How the existing business models around the data involved (harvesting , auctioning etc) might play into this already , and in the years to come. As well as how other business is implicated. Good old “Follow the money” I guess .